A Little Death by Laura Wilson Page A

it’s true. About me, anyway. Thomas seems to hate me almost as much as Father does.’
    ‘That’s why you’ve got to go. You can’t just be stuck away here forever or you’ll end up like someone’s mad old aunt.’
    ‘I’ll just have to be a mad old aunt then, because I haven’t got any choice.’
    ‘You could get married.’
    ‘How on earth am I supposed to do that?’
    ‘Honestly, Georgie, all you’d have to do is meet someone. You’re beautiful, even I can see that.’
    I was completely taken aback when he said that. I didn’t
feel
beautiful and nobody had ever told me I was. Well, how could they? Nobody ever saw me and anyway, my clothes were an absolute fright. I remember thinking if I am beautiful, perhaps I can make a man fall in love with me. Then he’ll buy me lovely dresses and emeralds and diamonds, and I’ll be like the ladies in the fashion plates.
    ‘Look, Georgie, it can’t be that difficult, other people manage it.’
    ‘Yes, but we aren’t other people, Edmund. Well, you nearly are because of going to school, but I’m not.’
    ‘You can learn. You just watch the other people and what they do, and then you do it. I did it at school, it’s easy. Everyone does it.’
    ‘But even if I could, the only men I know are you and Father. I can’t marry you, so whom am I going to have for a husband?’
    Well, of course, Edmund had no answer to that, but he was right; I did have to get away from Father and marriage was the only way to do it. And, much to my surprise, I found that it was really rather easy.

ADA
    If someone had told me that that was how a woman came to have a baby I’d have said they were having me on. Anyway, how would you begin to describe something like that, there weren’t any words—well, I suppose I knew there must be some words somewhere, but I certainly didn’t know what they were. I thought: that must be the cause of babies and of course I started to worry in case I suddenly got one. I kept looking in the mirror to see if I was getting fatter, because that was the only way I knew to tell. It scared me, because they’d put you away if you had a baby and no husband. That used to happen all the time and with some of them, they never let them out again. The way they treated those girls, as if they were dirt—which a lot of them were, I don’t deny it. But not me. Yet there I was, one of the good girls at school—that was before my father took me out of it to put me to work—worrying that I might have a baby from a man who’d never said so much as one word about marrying me! I was far too scared to say anything to William. It sounds daft now, but I was more embarrassed about saying it to him than I was scared of the baby coming. William left Dennys within a couple of weeks. He’d been polite enough after, but nothing special, no more kisses when no one was looking. And I wasn’t going to go making up to him, not likely!
    Well, that was that and I didn’t think any more of it. I was too busy worrying in case a baby came. I thought it took about six months before you had the baby, so I kept checking, but my waist got thinner, not fatter, and in the end I said to myself this can’t be right, so I didn’t bother with it after that. I had no idea there were other signs. If I’d known
that
, I could have put myself out of my misery in a couple of weeks. It might seem funny enough now, but it wasn’t at the time. But there was William, all prepared to go off to his new situation, baby or not, or so I thought at the time. The last thing he said to me was, ‘You’re a pal, Ada.’ And I thought, well, thank you so kindly, I don’t think.
    When he left, that was the time when they found out that Miss Georgina’s nurse wasn’t looking after her like she should, so she was sent away. Miss Georgina was very ill after that; for a time they thought she wouldn’t live, but she’s always been stronger than she looks.
    Ellen and I weren’t getting on at all. She’d